of them would kill him in the end. The first meal since Helen, the first tank of petrol since Helen, the first time the post dropped through the door, the first glass of water, the first cup of tea. It was endless and it was burying him already.
He left the house. Outside, he saw that someone-most likely one of the neighbours-had left a bunch of flowers on his doorstep. Daffodils. It was that time of year. Winter faded to spring and he needed desperately to stop time altogether.
He picked up the flowers. She liked daffodils. He'd take them to her. They're so cheerful, she'd say. Daffodils, darling, are flowers with spunk.
The Bentley was where Deborah had carefully parked it, and when he opened the door, Helen's scent floated out to him. Citrus, and she was with him.
He slid into the car and closed the door. He rested his head on the steering wheel. He breathed in shallowly because it seemed to him that deep breaths would dissipate the scent more quickly, and he needed the fragrance to last as long as it possibly could. He couldn't bring himself to adjust the car seat from her height to his, to sort out the mirrors, to do anything that would erase her presence. And he asked himself how, if he couldn't do this much, this very simple and essential thing because, for the love of God, the Bentley wasn't even the car she regularly drove, so what did it matter, then how could he possibly walk through what he had to walk through now?
He didn't know. He was operating on rote behaviors that he hoped could carry him from one moment to the next.
Which meant starting the car, so that was what he did. He heard the Bentley purr beneath his touch and he reversed it out of the garage like a man performing keyhole surgery.
He glided slowly along the mews and into Eaton Terrace. He kept his eyes averted from his front door because he didn't want to imagine-and he knew he would imagine, how could he help it?-what Deborah St. James had seen when she'd walked round the corner having parked the car.
As he drove to the hospital, he knew he was taking the same route the ambulance had taken when bearing Helen to Casualty. He wondered how much she'd been aware of what was going on around her: drips being established, oxygen seeping into her nose, Deborah somewhere nearby but not as close as those who listened to her chest and said her breathing was laboured on the left side now, nothing going into a lung that had already collapsed. She'd have been in shock. She wouldn't have known. One moment she'd been on the front steps, searching out her door key, and the next she'd been shot. Short range, they'd told him. Less than ten feet away, probably closer to five. She'd seen him, and he'd seen the shock on her face, the surprise to find herself suddenly vulnerable.
Had he called her name? Mrs. Lynley, have you a moment? Countess? Lady Asherton, isn't it? And she'd turned with that embarrassed, breathless laugh of hers. "Drat! That silly story in the paper. All of it was Tommy's idea, but I expect I cooperated more than I should have done."
And then the gun: automatic pistol, revolver, what did it matter? A slow, steady squeeze on the trigger, that great equaliser among men.
He found it difficult to think and even more difficult to breathe. He struck the steering wheel as a means of bringing himself round to the moment he was in and not one of the moments already lived through. He struck it to distract himself, to cause himself pain, to do anything to keep from fracturing beneath everything that assaulted him from memory and imagination.
Only the hospital could save him, and he hurried in the direction of its refuge. He wove round buses and dodged cyclists. He braked for a crocodile of tiny schoolchildren on the kerb waiting to cross the street. He thought of their own child among them-his and Helen's: high socks, scabby knees, and miniature brogues, a cap on his head, a name tag fluttering round his neck. The teachers would have printed it for him, but he'd have been the one to decorate it any way that he liked. He'd have chosen dinosaurs because they'd taken him-he and Helen-to the Natural History Museum on a Sunday afternoon. There he'd stood beneath the bones of the